Snappy the Clam

There's a pretty long article coming out in the NY Times Magazine tom'w (already online) on teens blogging, mainly the LiveJournal flavor. The writer catches the weird public/private tension involved in blogs well. This has always been a background hum online; viz Cameron Barrett getting fired for his coworkers reactions to his online fiction. But now it's right on the edge; these kids are savvy enough to exploit the rapidly slackening tension between blog use by their peer groups and the fact that the medium is still relatively obscure. Teens now are doing some very interesting things with blogs/journals, and what's interesting is that they've pretty much done it in their own ecosystem - they haven't been told they're a smart mob, or that they're participating in a personal publishing revolution. It would be interesting to see if any of the conventional blog wisdom applies in this community - power law distributions and the like. I suspect from reading the article you'd see much different patterns. For one thing, I think you'd see something much closer to the niche publishing models discussed on the theory blogs - David Weinberger's "everyone will be famous for 15 people." This works perfectly for adolescents - the blog can act a type of "clique amplifier." Instead of the starfucker model, you get "cool kid" blogs, "jock" blogs.

The reactions I've seen so far are interesting, and have pretty much convinced me that we really do have no idea where this stuff is going to go in future. Anil's "i fear it may take us another few years to live down the impression generated by this story" (no link due to lack of permalinks) strikes me as missing the point, if the point is that the "serious" bloggers are somehow going to be tarred with this brush. This is how the medium is being used by the generation which will quite likely be the first to take it for granted. This is your real emergent democracy, your real "citizen media," save the self-aggrandizement and jockeying to try and figure how they can best be pitched.

So we should be paying attention to what they do with it. Instead of throwing his hands up in the air and wondering why American teens don't text as much as their Japanese counterparts, these are the "Smart Mobs" that Howard Rheingold should be studying. The technology often evolves in ways that all the theorizers about journalistic revolutions and nanopublishing can't even begin to comprehend. Here's your real blog revolution. Right under your noses, and mainly from the redheaded stepchild of the blogging world.